Does anybody really take their bike to a shop to get a puncture repaired? Fair enough if you don't want to spend the time (or but the tools) for major repairs, but surely the ability to fix a puncture is a prerequisite for riding a bike. What do you do if you puncture miles from anywhere?

You call your friend whose enthusiasm for cycling fired your own and which led you to purchase the cheap hybrid that you ride now everywhere without a thought for maintenance. You also call when the chain comes as you've just had your nails done.

In fairness, she offered to wheel the bike round to me so that I could show her how to put the chain back and then finally surged through that cycling milestone of working out how to do it herself.

Had a similar customer to Al many years ago, fixed a puncture, even down to replacing the tyre. Said customer came back in a couple of days later, having commuted from West London to WC2 twice, complaining that they had another puncture, and it was all our fault. I politely pointed out that it was more likely to be the fault of the three inch long nail sticking through the tyre.

Puncture? That's nothing. Wait till you get a customer drag in a carton containing one of Korea's finest BSOs and demand that you build it up for him. While he waits. For free. "But you're a bike shop ..."

Does anybody really take their bike to a shop to get a puncture repaired?

I don't know, on the club run on sunday a guy was suggesting the club put on maintenance courses so he didn't have to take his (expensive) bike into the shop three times a year for maintenance. That's a guy who does a couple of hundred km a week who couldn't do anything more than fix a puncture and lube a chain - its not hard to imagine that there's a lot of people who wouldn't know how to do even that.

Does anybody really take their bike to a shop to get a puncture repaired?

Me – although strictly speaking I didn't intend to take it to a bike shop for a puncture repair. I’d been doing a couple of practice loops for a triathlon the next day and punctured twice on glass left over from a mini-marathon. Got back to the place I was staying and thought I’d better go grab another tube rather than rely on the fixed 23c tube.

So I popped out to find a local bike shop and as I didn’t know the area I ended up cycling 8 miles before I found a shop, in the process I got another puncture, as I had nipped out I didn’t have any tools with me and I have an Alfine bolted hub. So I bought 3 tubes, a new rear tyre and asked them to fix the back puncture.

Bloody expensive “nip out” as I was charged 8 euro a tube (In a specialized box, I should have known better), 15 euro for the repair as well as the 65 euro for the new tyre.

Do you all fix punctures on your own cars? Service them too? How can you possibly drive thousands of miles in a machine without having at least the ability to carry out basic and regular maintenance? The mechanical principles are just the same

Some people just want to ride their bike to the newsagent every evening without carrying a loaded camelback, and are happy to call on the services of their LBS for routine work (which in some way goes to make up for the loss of revenue from the try-local-buy-online types here and keeps our LBS's open)

Glad I had a spare tube for this one, always gets on ym nerves when out with people who can't even mange to put a chain back on or fix a puncture, there is a line, but those two tasks are well under it